Are Mites Causing Your Rosacea?

Aug. 30, 2012 -- A tiny mite may be the cause of the skin condition rosacea.

Rosacea causes flushing, redness, and bumps across the nose, cheeks, chin, and forehead. It usually strikes after age 30 and affects more women than men. It tends to flare in response to certain triggers, like sun exposure or emotional stress.

“Previously, people had no real idea what caused the condition,” says researcher Kevin Kavanagh, PhD, a biologist at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth in Kildare, Ireland.

Antibiotics can help clear a rosacea flare-up. And doctors once thought that was because of the drugs’ calming effect on underlying inflammation. But puzzlingly, other drugs that target inflammation, like corticosteroids, don’t seem to help.

So Kavanagh and his team started searching for bacteria that might trigger rosacea.

How Mites Might Cause Rosacea

Demodex mites live on the skin of 20% to 80% of adults. The tiny bugs are invisible to the naked eye. Until recently, it was thought that the mites lived harmlessly, feeding off the oily sebum that coats the skin.

Kavanagh says changes in the skin brought on by age, stress, or illness sometimes allows the population of Demodex mites to swell. Research shows that people with rosacea have more than 10 times as many Demodex mites on their skin as people without the condition.

“When each of those [mites] dies, they release bacteria into the skin,” he says.

Those bacteria trigger an immune reaction that causes redness and inflammation of the skin. The mites themselves don’t seem to be harmful, Kavanagh says. It’s the bacteria they have inside their bodies.

“You can think of them like a bus,” he says. “They bus in large numbers of bacteria. But it’s not the bus that’s the problem; it’s the bacteria that get off the bus that’s the problem.”

Kavanagh sums up the research linking Demodex mites to rosacea in a new review published in the Journal of Medical Microbiology.